Some Notes on Ahmadinejad's "Insult to
Humanity" Comment
vom 17.8.2012
http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2012/08/some-notes-on-ahmadinejads-insult-to.html
As tends to happen whenever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech, especially one in commemoration
of Al-Quds Day that explicitly rejects the ideology
of Zionism and condemns the Israeli government for its inherently
discriminatory, exclusivist, and ethnocentric policies and actions, all hell
broke lose after the Iranian President addressed a large crowd at Tehran
University on Friday.
"The existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to all humanity,"
Ahmadinejad said, adding
that "confronting the existence of the fabricated Zionist regime is in
fact protecting the rights and dignity of all human beings."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the
remarks as "offensive and inflammatory." The European Union's
foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is leading nuclear negotiations with
Naturally, Ahmadinejad's words also sparked the usual
shock and horror from the usual people, the same people who still insist that
(1) Ahmadinejad called for
Without delving into the persistent myths and deliberate falsehoods surrounding
that particular talking point (one that has been sufficiently debunked countless times though
obviously never seems to cut through the hasbara)
or seeking to justify anything said by Ahmadinejad, a
few things should be noted:
First: While Associated Press described Ahmadinejad's
comment as "one of his sharpest attacks yet against the Jewish
state," which seemed to indicate that this is the first time such language
has been used, they failed to point out that Ahmadinejad
has used this exact same phrase before.
After Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at a
"National and Islamic Solidarity for the Future of Palestine"
conference in February 2010, Ha'aretz reported he had said
that "the existence of 'the Zionist regime' is an insult to humanity,
according to Iranian news agency IRNA."
Later that year, he said the very
same thing.
Second (and more important): The "insult to humanity" phrase
was not coined by the Iranian President to describe a political power structure
defined by demographic
engineering, colonialism, racism, and violence.
For example, a
But the phrase has far deeper roots - roots with which the UN Secretary-General
himself should be well acquainted.
A joint
declaration by 20 Asian and African
countries issued to the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) on
The declaration stated:
1. We condemn categorically the apartheid policies of the Government of
South Africa, based on racial superiority, as immoral and inhuman;
2. We deprecate most strongly the South African Government's irresponsible
flouting of world opinion by its persistent refusal to put an end to its racial
policies;
3. The apartheid policies of the Government of South Africa are a flagrant
violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter, as well as being an
insult to humanity.
The very first International
Conference on Human Rights, held by the UN in (get this)
Tehran from April 22 to May 13, 1968, "condemned the brutal and inhuman
practice of apartheid," "deplore[d] the Government of
South Africa's continuous insult to humanity," and "declare[d]
that the policy of apartheid or other similar evils are a crime
against humanity."
On
The UN General
Assembly has repeatedly reaffirmed "that
the conclusion of an internal convention on the suppression and punishment of
the crime of apartheid would be an important contribution to the
struggle against apartheid, racism, economic exploitation, colonial
domination and foreign occupation" and, more specifically, the UN has
affirmed time and
again that "the inalienable rights of all peoples, and in particular...the
Palestinian people, to freedom, equality and self-determination, and the
legitimacy of their struggles to restore those rights."
No one can accuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
of having any affinity whatsoever for Zionism or the government of
In April 1976, just two months before the Soweto Uprising, South
African Prime Minister (and known former Nazi sympathizer) John Vorster took an
official state
visit to
Vorster lamented that both
Michael Ben-Yair,
We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring
international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from
That oppressive regime exists to this day.
Avraham Burg,
Israel's Knesset Speaker from 1999 to 2003 and former chairman of the Jewish
Agency for Israel, has long determined that
"Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and
democracy," insisting the only way to maintain total Jewish control over
all of historic Palestine would be to "abandon democracy" and
"institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison
camps and detention villages." He has also called
Yossi Sarid, who served as
a member of the Knesset between 1974 and 2006, has written of
Yossi Paritzky, former
Knesset and Cabinet minister, writing about the systematic institutionalization
and legalization of racial and religious discrimination in Israel, stated that Israel
does not act like a democracy in which "all citizens regardless of race,
religious, gender or origin are entitled to equality." Rather, by
implementing more and more discriminatory laws that treat
Palestinians as second-class
citizens, "Israel decided to be like apartheid‑era
South Africa, and some will say even worse countries that no longer
exist."
Shulamit Aloni, another
former Knesset and Cabinet member, has written that
"the state of
In 2008, the Association of Civil Rights in
Ehud Olmert, when he was Prime Minister, told a Knesset
committee meeting, "For sixty years there has been discrimination against
Arabs in
Ehud Barak has admitted that
"[a]s long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one
political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or
non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians
cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
Shlomo Gazit, former member
of Palmach, an elite unit of the Haganah,
wrote in Ha'aretz that "in the present situation,
unfortunately, there is no equal treatment for Jews and Arabs when it comes to
law enforcement. The legal system that enforces the law in a discriminatory way
on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid
regime."
Last summer, Knesset minister Ahmed Tibi told the
Jerusalem Post that "keeping the status quo will deepen apartheid in
Israel as it did in South Africa," while Gabriela Shalev,
former Israeli ambassador to the UN, told The Los Angeles Times last year that, in
terms of public opinion of Israel, "I have the feeling that we are seen
more like South Africa once was."
Council on Foreign Relations member Stephen Roberts, after returning from a
trip to Israel and the West Bank, wrote in The
Nation that "Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a
horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with
body-ravaging coils of razor wire."
In April 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu's own nephew, Jonathan
Ben Artzi wrote that
Israel's "policies of segregation and discrimination that ravaged (and
still ravage) my country and the occupied Palestinian territories"
undoubtedly fit the definition of Apartheid.
Linguist, cultural anthropologist, and Hebrew University professor David Shulman wrote in May 2012
in The New York Review of Books that there already exists "a single
state between the Jordan River and the sea" controlled by Israel and which
fits the definition of an "ethnocracy."
He continues,
Those who recoil at the term "apartheid" are invited to offer a
better one; but note that one of the main architects of this system, Ariel
Sharon, himself reportedly adopted South African
terminology, referring to the noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves he envisaged
for the
These Palestinian Bantustans now exist, and no one should pretend that they're
anything remotely like a "solution" to
Whether those who get hysterical over Ahmadinejad's
rhetoric agree with the above assessments - all of which were made by prominent
Israeli and Jewish politicians, officials, and academics - is irrelevant.
It's clear that Ahmadinejad himself would agree.
Consequently, his reference to
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Posted by Nima Shiraz